Been a little while since my last post here. A short explanation of the last 4 months in bullet point format:

• Moved to Tampa
• Turned 25
• Overtime at work
• Studying for the CCNA and A+ exams

Time was a precious commodity the past few months and I finally got a chance to breathe, collect myself and write a new post. While trying to write this post, I managed to update some of the code running this blog to help automate posting and updating of my resume.

The one feature that I spent far too much time researching was converting my resume to pdf automatically when I publish a change. I honestly don’t update it that much, but I thought it would be an easy task to generate it once I updated it with some new information. So my search began for a markdown to pdf tool. Ultimately I went with wkhtmltopdf, but I’ll give some reasoning why I did not choose the other projects I found.

HTMLDoc

Ultimately did not respect any CSS, so my pdf was this lifeless, unformatted page that looked like something out of the mid 90s.

Prince

Very nice tool, the free one watermarks your pdf files and the “professional” license is nearly $500. Would be nice to use for a commercial CMS where dynamic PDF download is needed.

Flying Saucer

Written in Java, so it was a bit complicated to setup, but could be called via JRuby. Did not feel like respecting the print stylesheet either.

wkhtmltopdf

Someone came up with the brilliant idea of making a command line wrapper around Qt’s implementation of WebKit (the Safari browsing engine) purely for making PDFs out of HTML pages. It worked flawlessly, except on my Snow Leopard mac when I feed it the option to load the print style. I was forced to run this on an Ubuntu system I manage at home.

Conclusion

I may make a second part to this post about the automation I’ve done on this blog, but for now you can take a peek at the commented code in the Rakefile